NCJ Number
204928
Date Published
2004
Length
31 pages
Annotation
This chapter considers the current trajectories and future possibilities of the enhanced policing capacity within and across Europe.
Abstract
Transnational crimes, such as trafficking in humans and drugs, has justified and spurred the emergence of cross-border policing. According to the author, the consequences of an enhanced, cross-border European policing capacity are: (1) the cross-border dispersal of the means of legitimate surveillance and violence, and (2) the loosening of the connection between police, nation, and sovereign statehood. The chapter goes on to charge that intergovernmentalism is the main process through which cross-border police cooperation is accomplished. The author poses a series of questions concerning whether European policing suffers from “democratic deficits.” The political theory of postnational policing allows a focus on the problems of authorization and legitimation raised by the bureaucratically dominated police processes and institutions of Europe. To analyze the potential trajectories of European policing, the relationships between the competing subnational, national, and transnational agencies that are instrumental in shaping European policing are explored, as are the discourses that such agencies rely upon. The professional practices and cultures of policing across Europe are discussed and the divergences between historically centralized and decentralized policing systems are enumerated. The importation of policing styles from other nations may erode the differences between national policing styles. However, the transnational quality of policing continues to gain momentum around the ideology of European security. The author explores the relationship between European elites who are pursuing closer police cooperation and the various strands of European public opinion. Two main conclusions are drawn: (1) that European policing will develop without regard to the formation of public will, and (2) that the hegemonic rhetoric of security will manufacture a European public opinion from the top down. The remainder of the chapter focuses on how the relationship between security and citizenship will be articulated in the coming years. One consequence of the proliferation of cross-border policing is the collapsing of democratic legitimacy into social legitimacy, which serves to reduce the question of legitimacy to whether forms of cross-border policing are acceptable to European citizens. The author suggests conceptualizing the problem of democracy in Europe around the principle of public justice, which includes the elements of recognition, human rights, and resources or allocations. Notes, references